The image module contains functions for loading and saving pictures, as well as
transferring Surfaces to formats usable by other packages. .

Note that there is no Image class; an image is loaded as a Surface object. The
Surface class allows manipulation (drawing lines, setting pixels, capturing
regions, etc.).

The image module is a required dependency of Pygame, but it only optionally
supports any extended file formats. By default it can only load uncompressed
BMP images. When built with full image support, the pygame.image.load()
function can support the following formats.

JPG

PNG

GIF (non animated)

BMP

PCX

TGA (uncompressed)

TIF

LBM (and PBM)

PBM (and PGM, PPM)

XPM

Saving images only supports a limited set of formats. You can save to the
following formats.

Load an image from a file source. You can pass either a filename or a Python
file-like object.

Pygame will automatically determine the image type (e.g., GIF or bitmap)
and create a new Surface object from the data. In some cases it will need to
know the file extension (e.g., GIF images should end in ”.gif”). If you
pass a raw file-like object, you may also want to pass the original filename
as the namehint argument.

The returned Surface will contain the same color format, colorkey and alpha
transparency as the file it came from. You will often want to call
Surface.convert() with no arguments, to create a copy that will draw
more quickly on the screen.

For alpha transparency, like in .png images use the convert_alpha()
method after loading so that the image has per pixel transparency.

Pygame may not always be built to support all image formats. At minimum it
will support uncompressed BMP. If pygame.image.get_extended()
returns ‘True’, you should be able to load most images (including png, jpg
and gif).

Creates a string that can be transferred with the ‘fromstring’ method in
other Python imaging packages. Some Python image packages prefer their
images in bottom-to-top format (PyOpenGL for example). If you pass True for
the flipped argument, the string buffer will be vertically flipped.

The format argument is a string of one of the following values. Note that
only 8bit Surfaces can use the “P” format. The other formats will work for
any Surface. Also note that other Python image packages support more formats
than Pygame.

This function takes arguments similar to pygame.image.tostring(). The
size argument is a pair of numbers representing the width and height. Once
the new Surface is created you can destroy the string buffer.

The size and format image must compute the exact same size as the passed
string buffer. Otherwise an exception will be raised.

See the pygame.image.frombuffer() method for a potentially faster way to
transfer images into Pygame.